Tag Archives: Jane Goodall

Gombe National Park, Tanzania. Acquired by Sentinel-2 in December 2016. Image courtesy of ESA.

Being able to visualise the changing face of the planet over time is one of the greatest strengths of satellite remote sensing. Our previous blog showed how Dubaiâ€™s coastline has evolved over a decade, and last week NASA described interesting work theyâ€™re doing on monitoring habitat loss for chimpanzees in conjunction with the Jane Goodall Institute.

Jane Goodall has spent over fifty years working to protect and conserve chimpanzees from the Gombe National Park in Tanzania, and formed the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977. The Institute works with local communities to provide sustainable conservation programmes.

A hundred years ago more than one million chimpanzees lived in Africa, today the World Wildlife Fund estimate the population may only be around 150,000 to 250,000. The decline is stark. For example, the Ivory Coast populations have declined by 90% within the last twenty years.

One of the key factors contributing to this decline is habitat loss, mostly through deforestation; although other factors such as hunting, disease and illegal capture also contributed.

Forests cover around 31% of the planet, and deforestation occurs when trees are removed and the land has another use instead of being a forest. In chimpanzee habitats, the deforestation is mostly due to logging, mining and drilling for oil. This change in land use can be monitored from space using remote sensing. Satellites produce regular images which can be used to monitor changes in the natural environment, in turn giving valuable information to conservation charities and other organisations.

In 2000 Lilian Pintea, from the Jane Goodall Institute, was shown Landsat images comparing the area around the Gombe National Park in 1972 and 1999. The latter image showed huge deforestation outside the parkâ€™s boundary. The Institute have continued to use Landsat imagery to monitor what is happening around the National Park. In 2009 they began a citizen science project with local communities giving them smartphones to report their observations. Combining these with ongoing satellite data from NASA has helped develop and implement local plans for land use and protection of the forests. Further visualisation of this work can be found here. The image at the top was acquired Sentinel-2 in December 2016 and shows the Gombe National Park, although it is under a little haze.

The satellite data supplied by NASA comes from the Landsat missions, which currently have an archive of almost forty-five years of satellite data, which is freely available to anyone. We also used Landsat for data in our Dubai animation last week. Landsat captures optical data, which means it operates in a similar manner to the human eye â€“ although the instruments also have infrared capabilities. However, one drawback of optical instruments is that they cannot see through clouds. Therefore, whilst Landsat is great for monitoring land use when there are clear skies, it can be combined with synthetic aperture radar (SAR), from the microwave spectrum, as it can see through both clouds and smoke. This combination enables land use and land change to monitored anywhere in the world. Using the freely available Landsat and Sentinel-1 SAR data you could monitor what is happening to the forests in your neighbourhoods.

Satellite data is powerful tool for monitoring changes in the environment, and with the archive of data available offers a unique opportunity to see what has happened over the last four decades.